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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.